Remember that time when Batman and Superman stopped fighting because they realised they had both been raised by women named Martha? Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, is centred on an equally silly contrivance. Just as Zack Snyder noted the aforementioned tenuous link between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, O'Farrell twigged that William Shakespeare had a short-lived son named Hamnet and also wrote a play titled 'Hamlet'. Could the two be linked? Err, no. 'Hamlet' was based on the Danish legend of Amleth and doesn't feature so much as a single dead son. But in O'Farrell's eyes Willy the Shake wrote the tragedy as a coping mechanism for the grief he felt over the loss of his boy, which is odd given how the bard penned a couple of comedies in the immediate aftermath of his kid's death.
That inciting incident doesn't arrive until about 80 minutes into Zhao's film. Before then we spend a lot of time watching the uptight William (Paul Mescal) awkwardly court the free-spirited Agnes (Jessie Buckley). William works as a teacher, but what he really wants to do is direct (and write) while Agnes seems to just potter about the woods collecting ingredients for her alternative medicine hobby (were she around today, Agnes would likely be an anti-vaxxer). As was the custom of the day, the two are quickly married and Agnes gives birth to a girl, followed by twins Judith and Hamnet soon after. As the 16th century suburbs don't boast much of a theatre scene, William heads off to London to pursue his dreams, leaving Agnes to raise the kids. When Hamnet is 12 he perishes from the plague, creating a rift between his parents, with Agnes blaming William for not being around. William retreats further into his work, improvising monologues as he gazes into the London night.
Zhao and O'Farrell insist on projecting modern attitudes onto their period piece, making it difficult to buy into the characters. Agnes' haranguing of her husband for being away from home for long spells comes off as entitled in an era when most husbands and fathers were off dying on battlefields. Lives were short in this era, and life simply didn't have the same value as it does today.
Had Hamnet been more honest about the brutality of its setting, I may have been emotionally moved as intended. After all, some of my favourite movies of this century (The Son's Room, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Koko-di Koko-da) are concerned with parents coping with the loss of a child, but Zhao's film never once threatened to engage my tear ducts. Its approach is far too needy, filled with bluntly obvious "cry now" manipulations. At one point a character tells another to "keep your heart open," which feels like Zhao addressing anyone who refuses to be manipulated.
Despite spending so much time in the company of William and Agnes, and despite the best efforts of Buckley and Mescal, they never come across as anything other than caricatures of an earth mother and her emotionally distant hubby. Zhao's best films (Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider, Nomadland) have a remarkable naturalness that makes us feel as if we're watching scenes that would have played out regardless of whether Zhao and her camera were present, but everything here feels artificial and forced. It's as tacky as all those bad music biopics that contrive scenes to explain a certain famous lyric. For a movie about a revered artist (or as the kids would call Shakespeare today, a content creator) it has very little to say about the artistic process. Mescal's Shakespeare makes composing all-timer plays look as interesting as prompting an AI for a casserole recipe.
Things reach a nadir in a laughably ridiculous climax that sees Agnes attend the first staging of 'Hamlet'. Max Richter's score suddenly gives way to his 2004 composition 'On the Nature of Daylight', the most over-used piece of music in 21st century media. Aside from its staleness, Zhao dropping a famous Richter piece in a movie that's actually scored by the composer is akin to Spielberg insisting on inserting the Jaws theme into Raiders of the Lost Ark. The overwrought scene is written and performed in a manner that suggests that despite being married to the world's most famous playwright, the concept of a play is completely alien to the ditzy Agnes, who seems to think the actors are literally addressing the audience. To extend the Spielberg analogy, it's like if Kate Capshaw attended the premiere of Jurassic Park and thought the dinosaurs were real.
Directed by: Chloé Zhao
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Jacobi Jupe, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jack Shalloo, David Wilmot
